Blog Site Moving

My blog posts are moving to our new home located at Mindsharpblogs where you can find a number of prominent posters providing you with some great tips and tricks on all things SharePoint. If you happen to drop by here, please note the new address and add us to your list of favorites and feeds.

Back to Basics

As more and more folks start turning to SharePoint as their solution of choice for information distribution and collaboration, I have been noticing that many of these installations seem to have been quick, no research installations. A number of these installations suffer from common mistakes that are then made by well intentioned, but over-worked and under trained Administrators. In an effort to help stem the tide and perhaps save one or two of you the trouble of having to redeploy SharePoint in an effort to fix an unsuccessful roll-out I’d like to take a trip back to the basics.

First of all, if you are reading this then you are indeed a step ahead of those who did not take the time to do at least a little bit of research on how to properly deploy SharePoint before inserting the CD and hitting OK. With a little planning and forethought you can avoid many of the common mistakes that plague the first time install.

Step 1: Do not use your own personal account when installing SharePoint onto your servers. The account that is used to do the actual binary installation of the SharePoint files is going to own those files and have certain privileged access that, for tighter security, really shouldn’t be your user account. Furthermore, do not use a local user account, the local system account or a network system account for the installation of SharePoint binaries on your servers. SharePoint can scaled out into a distributed server deployment and local accounts simply will not provide you the access rights you’ll between servers. For this part you are going to want to create a basic user account in your Active Directory domain that you will use for the installation process. This account does not need to be a Domain Administrator, an Enterprise Administrator or even a Server Admin. It simply needs to be a member of the local Administrators group on your SharePoint Server systems. In addition to this you also need to grant the account DB Creator and Security Admin rights on the SQL server that will function as the back end database for your SharePoint deployment. That’s it.

Step 2: When performing the installation you will be presented with a couple of different options. the first of these choices will be to select between a Basic or an Advanced installation. This one is easy, always choose Advanced. Always. A Basic install will use SQL Express on the local system as your database and therefore limit the size of your SharePoint deployment. Also, you will not be able to expand your Basic install in the future by adding additional servers should you want to grow your SharePoint farm. The next option you will be presented with will the type of server installation to perform for your Advanced choice. These options include Complete, Web Front End and a Single Server install. Guess what, this really isn’t much of a choice either. Always perform a Complete installation. Always. The Single server option is the same as the Basic option from the previous screen and so has the same limitations. Choosing the Web Front End option will limit your flexibility in the future if you should want, or need, to move roles between servers, or worse, need to compensate for a failed system. Save yourself from future headaches and just perform an Advanced>Complete installation every time.

Step 3: Once you have installed SharePoint, making sure you used the account you created in step 1, you will then run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard. This is where you will actually create your Farm and establish your Central Administration Web Application. During this process the wizard will prompt you for the Database Server, Database Name and the credentials of an account that will be used for the Central Administration Application Pool. At this point you should once again supply the credentials of the account that you just used to actually perform the installation, the one you are currently logged onto the machine as running this very wizard. Yup, the installation account and the Central Administration service account really should be using the same account. This will help you down the road if these two accounts are indeed the same account. It has been my experience that when using different accounts for these two functions, odd behaviors can creep up in your SharePoint world.

Following these few simple steps can save you a number of headaches down the road while working with SharePoint and help get you off on the right foot. I realize that many over-stressed network folks simply don’t have the time to get any proper training before having to roll out a product such as SharePoint. Still, before you get to deep into such a project I highly recommend that you at least grab yourself a good book to keep by your side while deploying. One such tome I feel should be by the side of every SharePoint Administrator is the SharePoint Best Practices book by Ben Curry and Bill English.

Until next time…

Mindsharp offers first course in OCS 2007

That’s right, Mindsharp, for several years now known as the leader in SharePoint education has begun offering training in Microsoft’s Office Communications Server. Their first course in this new vertical for them is Core Technologies in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. This 5-day class focuses on the design, administration and troubleshooting of an OCS 2007 server deployment. Now let me be honest here, I am a bit biased when it comes to talking about this new course. After all, I had a part in putting it together. To find out more about just what is included in this class as well as where it is being offered, check out the earlier link. I hope to see some of you in class in the near future.

SharePoint Best Practices Conference

Following on the success of the first, and very popular, SharePoint Best Practices Conference, it has been announced that the second SharePoint Best Practices Conference will be held Feb 2-4, 2009. This time, however, the conference will be over on the West Coast, at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines in beautiful San Diego, CA. At this time some of the speakers will include a keynote by Joel Oleson, sessions lead by such SharePoint notables as Bill English, Ben Curry, Mike Watson, Todd Bleeker and Todd Klindt. For a full and current listing be sure to check out Best Practices SharePoint Conference and while you’re there, be sure to register, as space is limited.

SharePoint Best Practices Conference

Sponsored by Microsoft Press and Mindsharp, the first SharePoint Best Practices conference will be held this September in Washington D.C. This is one event I would highly reccomend you look into if you are in any way involved with a SharePoint deployment in your environment. For more information on the conference check out their website at www.sharepointbestpractices.com.

SharePoint Virtual Conference

I’m not big on self-promotion but I just wanted to take a moment to let people know about the upcoming SharePoint Virtual conference that is being hosted by SSWUG.org in October. To find out more information about this, like who will speaking, what the sessions will be, and other events, check out www.vconferenceonline.com. BTW – I’ll be presenting a few sessions myself so drop by and give it a look.

Having Issues?

I’m glad that some of you have found the information here of use to you. If you should happen to drop by looking for answers for an issue you’re having with SharePoint, a problem you’re trying to solve or a task your stuck on that would make for a good post, let me know and I’ll see if I can help out. In the meantime, happy SharePointing.

Customize the NewForm.aspx

My blog has moved to Mindsharpblogs. You will find this post there along with my newer postings. If you would like to leave a comment, please check out the new location. Thanks for dropping by.

Have you ever wanted to change the fields presented in a form when you create a new announcement or task for your SharePoint team site? Do you wish you could remove a field or two in order to keep someone from changing important metadata once a document has been uploaded into your library? Perhaps you would simply like to expose different fields to different users when editing information in a document library or list. Well, follow along with me now because I’m going to take you on a short journey and show you how to do just these very things.

Hello, my name is Daniel A. Galant and for the past several months I have been employed as an instructor with Mindsharp, the SharePoint people. One of the questions that keeps coming up in our sessions is “How can I change the default new item or edit forms to present only the data fields I want certain user groups to be able to modify?” To begin, let’s take a look at just what it is we are trying to change.

When you want to enter a new item into, let’s say, your announcements list, SharePoint calls upon the NewForm.aspx page for that list, in this case, announcements. The page contains a customized List Form Web Part that displays default columns associated with the Announcements list properties. The New Item form cannot be edited within the browser, so in order for us to accomplish what we want to do, we will need to call upon our trusted companion tool, SharePoint Designer 2007.

To begin our modification journey let’s start by opening up a team site in the browser and taking a look at the default New Item page that we have to work with. Figure 1 shows the home page for the Technical issues team site that we will be modifying.

Figure 1: Technical Issues home page

By selecting the Add new announcement link we are presented with the standard Announcements: New Item page (Figure 2) for adding announcements to our list. Note the columns that are currently available for data entry: Title, body and Expires.

Figure 2: Announcements: New Item page

To modify this page we must open it in SharePoint Designer 2007 and then add a new custom List Form Web Part that displays only the fields that we wish our users to modify. Start Designer and then connect to the website that contains the list whose form you wish to modify, in our case that would be the Technical Issues Team site as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Technical Issues site loaded into Designer 2007

Next we need to open up the relevant NewForm.aspx page. In the Folder List expand Lists and then expand the list you want to work with. Again, we are going to modify the Announcements list so expand Announcements and select NewForm.aspx.

Figure 4: NewForm.aspx in the Announcements list

As you can see in Figure 5, the Announcements: New Item page contains a customized List Form Web Part that will display the fields we noted earlier when we opened the page in the browser. While we can edit the properties of this particular web part, we cannot edit the contents, nor do we want to delete the web part from the page as this can break the NewForm.aspx page and cause it to error out when you try to actually use it in your site. Stick with me because we are going to cover how to deal with this as we go though this tutorial. For now, we want to add some space below the current web part so that we may add our own custom list form to do with as we like.

Figure 5: The default NewForm.aspx page

Select the area just below the current list form and press Enter twice to give yourself some room to work with. Next, to add our custom list form go to your tool bar and select Insert>SharePoint Controls>Custom List Form.. as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Add a new Custom List Form

Selecting the Custom List Form will bring up the List or Document Library Form dialog shown in Figure 7 where we need to choose which list we are tying this new web part to as well as the type of form we want to create. In our example we are keeping the default Announcements list since we are creating a new Announcements form as well as selecting the New item form radio button because we want to use this web part to create new announcements for our site. If we were going to modify the web part for a different document library or list within our site we would need to choose that library or list from the drop down menu. If instead of creating a new item, we wanted to use this form to edit an already existing item; we would select the Edit item form radio button instead.

Figure 7: List or document library selection dialog

When finished you should have your new list form web part as displayed in Figure 8.

Figure 8: Newly added List Form web part

As mentioned earlier, the form we are using is pulling its data fields from the columns that are defined in the list or library that we are connecting the web part with. What if we want to create our own columns or collect information about items that are not currently part of the list or library? To do this we would need to add additional columns from already existing Site columns or simply create our own to suit our needs. To accomplish this task we must venture into the settings of the list or library that contain the items we want to collect or modify data from.

We’ll start by selecting the View All Site Content link at the top of our Quick Launch menu at the left hand side of the browser window. This will bring up the All Site Content screen as seen in Figure 9. Next we must select the list we are working with, in our case that would still be Announcements.

Figure 9: The All Site Content page

Once you are in the list or library that you want to add information to, select the Settings menu and then select List Settings, (Figure 10).

Figure 10: List Settings menu option

On the settings page for your list or library you will see a section titled Columns, (Figure 11). It is here that we can add columns from the already defined site columns in SharePoint or create a new column to collect whatever data we need for the items in our list.

Figure 11: Create or add new columns section

When you have defined the metadata types that you wish to collect on your list items, we need to make those columns available in our new List Form Web part. To do that, we’ll go back to SharePoint Designer 2007 and add the form elements into our new form.

In the Toolbox task pane you’ll notice a section labeled SharePoint Controls (Figure 12). If the Toolbox is not visible in your Designer, go to the Task Panes menu item and select Toolbox. Expand the SharePoint Controls and you’ll see the various elements that can be inserted into your form to allow you to collect the data that is relevant to your list items. These elements directly map to the column data types that are defined when you add or create a new column in any library or list within SharePoint.

Figure 12: SharePoint Controls in the Toolbox task pane

Select the data view control that maps to the type of field whose data you wish to collect and drag it from the toolbox and drop it into your new list form. This will bring up a control dialog in which you will map the control to the column in your list whose data you are interested in. You’ll notice in Figure 13 that we dropped a text box into our form and we are going to map it to the Modified By field in our Announcements list.

Figure 13: Mapping a list field to a data view control

Next we merely give our new control the proper label, (Figure 14) and then save our new NewForm.aspx page.

Figure 14: Adding the label for our control

Since we are modifying the default page you will receive a warning (Figure 15) that the page is being altered from the site definition. Select Yes to save the changes.

Figure 15: Site definition warning dialog

Now we can view our new New Item page in the browser and see just what we have done. As you can see in Figure 16 there are now two list form web parts on the page; our original web part with the default configuration of fields, and our new web part with its modified content.

Figure 16: New Item page with two list forms

Since we want to present only a single form for our users to fill out, with only the items we have selected for them to modify, we must hide the original web part on the page. To accomplish this we again return to Designer 2007 and the NewForm.aspx page we have been working with.

Select the original ListFormWebPart and hide it by right-clicking and selecting Web Part Properties from the popup menu. (Figure 17)

Figure 17: Selecting Web Part Properties popup

In the Announcements properties expand Layout and check the box for Hidden (Figure 18). Again, we don’t want to delete the default web part since this can break the page and cause it to error when trying to load within SharePoint. Remember to save the new page.

Figure 18: Hiding the default Announcements web part

We now have our Announcements: New Item page that only displays the elements that we want to expose to our users as seen in Figure 19.

Figure 19: The new Announcements: New Item page

Using the principles shown here you can create a form to display any of the content columns that are associated with your lists and libraries in your SharePoint deployment. But what about exposing different columns to different sets of users? By applying what we have learned here you can create separate web parts that expose only the columns you want exposed for each set of users and then apply audience filtering to make them accessible to the proper groups.

So what about removing elements from the Edit Item form so that metadata isn’t improperly changed when a user edits the properties of an existing document? Let’s take a quick look at the Edit item page for a document library where content types are enabled. Notice in Figure 20 in our Problem Reports library App Crash document properties there is a field to select the content type that is associated with this document. A misinformed user could potentially change the content type associated with this document and thereby change the metadata or even workflow’s attached with this document type.

Figure 20: Edit Item page showing Content Type selection box

To prevent this situation for occurring we need to modify the default EditForm.aspx page that is associated with this document library. To do that we need to use Designer, just as we did when modifying the NewForm.aspx page earlier.

Start by connecting to the site that contains the document library (our Technical issues site) and then locate the library you want to work with (Problem Reports in our case). Expand the library and you will see the associated forms as shown in Figure 21. This time we want to modify the EditForm.aspx page so open it with Designer.

Figure 21: Selecting the library to work with

Now just as we did with our previous NewForm.aspx page we need to add a new list form web part to the page and hide the existing default web part from our users. This time, however, when we insert our new web part we must be sure to connect it with the proper library (Problem Reports) as shown in Figure 22 and then select the proper form type (Edit item form) that we are creating as shown in Figure 23.

Figure 22: Connecting the form to the proper library

Figure 23: Configuring the List Form Web Part

From there it is simply a matter of configuring the field types, adding the proper SharePoint controls and saving our page. Figure 24 shows the modified Problem Reports library Edit Item page without a content type selection box.

Figure 24: Edit Item page without the Content Type selection box

So there you have it. You can now modify your default forms to display just the fields you want them to while hiding the ones you need to. I hope you have found this tutorial useful and if you should have questions or comments, please let us know. Till next time…

Welcome

Thanks for dropping by, my name is Daniel A. Galant and I am currently an Instructor and SharePoint advisor with Mindsharp. My goal for this site is to help share ideas, tools, tips and tricks centered around the SharePoint Products and Technologies. SharePoint is a deep collaboration platform that includes Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer and other tools for helping you share, store and find the information you want to accomplish the tasks you need.